Reply To: Exercise 13: Your Models for Leadership and Emotions
Essay #2: What are motivation, emotions, and self-awareness?
[Going to preface this one with the same as before: it feels like the more I write, the more I want to go back and revise, add, or remove things I already wrote. In order to fulfill the homework requirement, I’m forcing myself to stop here and just post this. So again, I can’t say I 100% agree with all of my own writing here. Please think of this as a first draft. Enjoy!]
If you want to lead people, you cannot do so without understanding what motivates people. What motivates people? You could argue a lot of different things, but to me, they all boil down to one basic element: emotion. And if you’re going to understand your own motivation and awareness, you’re going to need self-awareness. So let’s talk about all three.
Motivation is the feeling you get that makes you want to work toward a goal. It is arguably one of the most important feelings you can have. Without motivation to do anything…Well…It’s pretty hard to accomplish anything. Almost by definition, someone without motivation is clinically depressed. It fuels everything from social connections to skill development. You can have many motivations at the same time (and we all do! Are you hungry right now? Are you feeling like meeting a friend? Do you want to clean that mess up in your room? Do you want to learn to play that one song on guitar?), and you can even have two opposing motivations at the same time (ever wanted to eat that chocolate cake in the fridge but also want to lose weight for the wedding coming up?). In leadership, it’s key to learn how motivation works since you need to learn how to use motivation to inspire and drive people to work toward a vision. I would argue that every time you’ve ever felt motivated to do something it was driven entirely by emotion. I don’t think I’ve ever logically led myself to feel motivation…To me they feel more like they are created by our experiences and desires, rather than being consciously decided. If I think back on some of the strongest motivations I’ve ever had, they were all driven by something emotional: a desire to look good to others, a desire to make money, a desire to be accepted by peers, etc. Motivation is emotional.
If motivation is emotional, then what are emotions? For me personally, this is a realm I’ve been learning to explore more in depth over the past year, so I wouldn’t call myself an expert in emotions. This of course isn’t to say I never felt emotions before, but I actively tried to suppress many of my emotions for a long time, as I used to think that logic was “good” and emotion was just something that served to get in the way of “clear” thinking. More recently, I’ve come to realize the truth: the way I thought about decision making was completely backwards – I thought everything I do is logical but it turns out…nothing I do is logical, and everything is emotional. Everything I decide to do is based on emotion, and after my emotional brain makes its choice, my logical brain justifies it with logic. Emotion decided which university I wanted to go to, what I felt like eating, who I wanted to be friends with, and what kind of hobbies I wanted to do. So what are they? I think if I had to define them, I would call them chemical processes in our body that have evolved to encourage or discourage various behaviors. They encourage us to create social connections, make us feel bad when we don’t have them, or tell us to do something more, or to do it less!
I feel that motivation and emotions are closely related. But I think that most people go through life just accepting them for what they are and never thinking twice about them. But I find that raw motivation and emotions on their own, while just fine, have power that is left unlocked. To me, self-awareness is the key that is required to unlock the power of motivation and emotions. For example, if I want to learn how to play the guitar relying purely on motivation without knowing why, when, or how you feel motivated to play will almost guarantee that you don’t keep up with practice. Or if I’m learning to make perfect free-throws in basketball but I feel frustrated and angry every time I miss a shot, but never take a moment to try to understand why, it’s unlikely I’ll be able to keep going. Self-awareness (coupled with curiosity and mental flexibility) is the only way to check your motivation and emotions and get both aligned in the same direction towards a desired goal. Motivation and emotions are powerful tools that, when utilized and directed well (good luck trying to stop or control them), can be the difference between success and failure at any effort you make.
I consider myself a ceaseless student of life. I’m always trying to push myself to be better than I was yesterday, and I’m always trying to understand myself and how I relate to the world and people around me. Leadership represents the next step for me – a way to take the experiences I’ve had and try to utilize them to help others. It forces me to think beyond just examining myself; A ‘zooming-out’ to see a bigger picture of the world and people around me and thinking about how I relate to and affect them. I hope that by understanding motivation, emotions, and self-awareness better, I can learn to lead not only myself, but others around me more effectively.